This story was initially revealed in On Background with Mark Stenberg, a free, weekly publication that explores the important thing themes shaping the media trade. You may join it right here.
A number of months in the past, at a press dinner hosted by the writer 1440, I used to be commiserating with one other reporter a couple of current spate of media layoffs when Josh Kaplan chimed in.
Kaplan, the cofounder of the expertise company Clean Media, politely instructed that the doom and gloom narrative surrounding the media trade was misplaced, because it largely ignored maybe essentially the most thrilling house for media entrepreneurship in the mean time: YouTube.
“You’re trying within the incorrect route,” Kaplan stated. “On YouTube, every part is rising.”
Since then, as so usually occurs with these sorts of epiphanies, I’ve begun to see proof of this declare in every single place I look.
Final month, I profiled the unlikely reinvention of The Each day Beast, whose momentum comes largely from adopting a “creator at scale” technique that depends closely on platforms like Substack and YouTube. The Beast, which launched its YouTube simply earlier this 12 months, now has almost half one million subscribers on the positioning.
Equally, one other legacy writer, Complicated, has invested aggressively in its YouTube channel following its acquisition final 12 months by Ntwrk. The writer has shifted the majority of its editorial sources to video, each as a method to insulate itself from AI and as a tactic to interact its youthful viewers, CEO Aaron Levant informed ADWEEK.
Extra telling, nonetheless, is the rising flight of media entrepreneurs to YouTube.
